Three years ago my mother died. Since then I’ve been unable
to write anything more than short bursts. These words that she longed to share
with the world, that she shared with me, have been stuck inside of me. So now I
am sharing them.
These memories should never have been created but they must
be spoken.
The story is not my own but what my mother told me for many
years on the anniversary of what happened. She never wanted to speak of those
days but could never forget them. They were on her mind every day from
September 1947 until her sudden death in 2016. A few days before she died, she
had visited the Holocaust Memorial in Krakow, Poland. She had broken down
there, recollecting the never forgotten but largely unacknowledged pain of
Partition.
Her name was Adarsh Kumar. She was raised in Pind Dadan
Khan, Jhelum District in the Kapoor family. She created a beautiful life over
many decades, but with a pain inside of her from having survived unimaginable
horrors. Every September, we would have a havan (Hindu fire ceremony) for her
parents and brother who were killed in those days. Not every time, but often,
she would sit down with me and tell me of those days before and after
Partition. I can still see her now, feel her presence, telling these words that
she struggled so hard to say.
Life in undivided India had, for all intents and purposes,
come to an end several months before India and Pakistan became independent. Pind
Dadan Khan back then was home to Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. It was deep in
Punjab and so many miles from the new border. Their Muslim neighbor, Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan, was the head of the town. He was a believer in an undivided
and diverse post-independence India until the political realities dictated
otherwise. He faced opposition from members of the Muslim League and his own
household for his views.
My mother tells of growing up in this town where neighbors celebrated
every religious holiday together. The Raja would celebrate rakhi with her
mother. Rakhi is a ceremony that’s usually only celebrated between brother and
sister, but the Raja and my maternal grandmother were close friends. When the Shia Muslims would walk in bloody
processions on Muhurram, my mother and her family would watch from their
balconies as they cried out “Hai Hussein!”, in memory of their fallen imam from
so long ago. Hindus would celebrate Eid, and Muslims would celebrate Diwali in their
neighbors’ houses. They met together in the markets, used the same communal
tandoors and washed in the river, together. Everyone was united, various
religious communities that were also part of neighborhood communities.
This peace was shattered in February 1947. Someone threw a
rag soaked in kerosene into my mother’s house in the middle of the night, when
everyone was sleeping and there was a limited water supply. The fire was put
out by the family and neighbors, including my mother who was around 10 years
old. An uneasy feeling began to spread around the town. There was word of
religious strife in other parts of Punjab, but until then Pind Dadan Khan had
felt safe. It still felt like home.
In March, as my mother watched from her balcony, a Hindu man
came running down their street, bleeding profusely from his head. A Muslim
family had arrived from India and moved into the now vacant house next door
that had once belonged to a Hindu family that had left to India. The new
neighbor decided to use wood from his Hindu neighbor’s roof beams for cooking
fuel. When the Hindu neighbor protested, the wood was used to club him. The
Raja was enraged that the fire that was burning all over Punjab had now spread
to Pind Dadan Khan. As the neighborhood watched, the Raja declared that no
Hindus should leave the town, and everyone would have his personal guarantee of
safety. “Not a hair on their [Hindus] heads will be touched in Pind Dadan
Khan!”.
The most serious blow came shortly afterwards in May. My grandfather’s
cousin, Anant Ram Kapoor, was traveling home to Pind
Dadan Khan by train and bringing a box of pears and dried fruit. He was
harassed by some Muslim youths who began eating the fruit and tossing it off
the train. The teasing quickly escalated, and he was stabbed to death,
disemboweled right there on the train. The other Hindu passengers could only
watch helplessly. His body was then tossed off the train. After his cremation, my
mother says that a gloomy atmosphere enveloped the town. It didn’t feel safe.
It no longer felt like home. No one knew then what horrors still lay ahead on
those train tracks for millions more.
The Kapoor family knew they had to leave. In the summer,
someone had dug a hole into their ground floor pantry to rob the house. The ground
floor was a pantry and storage area, so it made easy access. Most disturbingly,
the hole was made in a common wall that they shared with the Raja. He surely
was not responsible, but it was a sign that law and order were deteriorating.
Hindus could find no justice in Pakistan. The same was happening across the
border in India to Muslims.
By August 14 and 15, when Pakistan and India respectively
gained their independence from the British, my mother had family members
scattered across the border in Jammu, Pathankot and Delhi. Her parents,
herself, and her younger brother and sister were all still in Pind Dadan Khan,
awaiting the return of her brother Raj from British military service in Iraq. There
was no celebration for Independence. There was anxiety, fear, and a foreboding
sense of gloom. They were refugees, and they knew it.
Once her brother returned, they packed up what they could
and left their house. While they awaited their chance to board a train, they
went to a large refugee camp that had been made near the railroad station in
Pind Dadan Khan. This was the same train station they had used so many times to
visit the family run coal mining business in Dandot to the west. India,
however, was to the east. My mother didn’t speak much about life in that camp.
She told me there was a virtual town there. They could only bring a few things with them—a rolled-up mattress,
some bedding, and a few belongings. My mother would navigate the narrow unpaved
roads in the camp holding her mother’s hand, bringing food and other supplies
to their father and younger siblings.
The evacuation of Hindus and Sikhs from west Punjab and
Muslims from east Punjab took many months. At first it was done by trucks, but
they were easily stopped and their occupants killed. Fearing the trucks, many
chose to flee on foot. This was just as perilous. The next obvious choice was
trains. These proved to be even deadlier.
According to another resident of Pind Dadan Khan, the first
train for evacuees, that departed on September 20 or so, was filled mostly by
Sikhs. No Hindus wanted to board this train because they expected it to be
targeted due to the intense animosity and bloodlust flowing between the Muslims
and Sikhs of Punjab in those days. My mother’s family was supposed to ride on
the train departing September 22, but instead left a day earlier, on September
21.
The steam train arrived at the station and was loaded. The family
was told they could not bring any large belongings, only what they could carry.
Anyone who was armed was disarmed, including Sikhs carrying their ritual
daggers and swords. There were a few closed passenger train compartments which
they were unable to board. Like most Partition refugees, they instead sat inside
flat cargo cars. My mother would use the term “coal” cars, but I think she
meant “cargo” because there were no seats, and the cars were open on all sides.
Men sat in one car and women in the other, facing each
other. My grandmother was sitting with her younger children: my mother (who was
around 11 years old) and her younger sister and younger brother. They sat close
to each other, protected from the elements by my grandmother’s blanket or
woolen shawl. Eventually, as night began to fall, the train pulled out of the
station.
After it picked up speed leaving town, it came to a halt
near Chalisa, not very far away. I’m not sure if the pause was initially due to
the rail gauge being different past Chalisa junction. My mother always said
someone had cut a tree and placed it on the track to block further movement. A
crowd gathered around the train, armed with farming tools, machetes and swords.
They were chanting “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is Great!) and “Kafiro ko maro!” (“Kill the infidels!”).
The slaughter began systematically with the men, including her father and
eldest brother Raj, in the cargo car in front of theirs.
The details at this point would become spotty from her tears
and the sheer agony of the memories that were burned into her heart.
Her mother hid the young children under her shawl. There was
a brief conversation between her and her mother.
“Adarsh, say the kalaam [become a Muslim], they’ll spare you
if you do.”
“I won’t become a Muslim, they’ll have to kill me!”
The slaughter continued under the night sky. I don’t know
what else she heard or saw. It was too painful for her to share. Her mother was
either wounded or about to be. They all knew she was dying that night. I have
reason to believe my mother witnessed my grandmother being struck by a weapon,
but was hidden enough under cover that she and her younger siblings were spared.
My mother was handed some 500 rupees by my grandmother.
“Take care of your sister and brother. Go.” These were the last words my mother
would hear from her own mother. The advice was taken to heart.
The line of killers either had moved further down the
compartment, were exhausted from manual slaughter, or were consolidating their loot when my mother quietly led her
sister and brother off the blood-soaked train. They jumped off the car and into
a neighboring corn field. They ran some distance away and hid. The train
eventually started again and delivered the cargo of death and slaughter to
Amritsar, where my aunt Hans collapsed in horror upon its arrival the next day.
I cannot imagine what it must have been like to witness the
total destruction of all that she knew, alone in a field, the bodies of her
parents and older brother moving away quickly into the night as she moved
toward an uncertain fate. The three young children—my mother, her sister and
her brother, were soon discovered in the corn field by a farmer who recognized
them as the Kapoor children, and was horrified at the role he had played in
aiding—perhaps participating—in the slaughter of his neighbors.
With much lamentation, he took them to his simple house.
There, they were to sleep. My mother didn’t sleep. She overheard the farmer and
his friends—accomplices?—debating what to do. Marry the girls off for a decent
price? Convert the boy to Islam and use him as a servant? There was much discussion.
Finally, the decision was made to inform the Raja; he would decide.
The Raja was horrified to learn what had happened. He took
his own horse and rode over to Chalisa to personally bring the children to his
house. My mother makes it sound like the journey took hours, but on a map the
distance is not that significant. I cannot imagine the exhaustion and trauma
she had experienced. Certainly, from the moment she set foot on the train, even
in her storytelling, time would seem to slow to a crawl.
When they got back to Pind Dadan Khan there was much
mourning. The Raja was horrified at what had happened to the train, and at the
fact that his beloved neighbors had been killed. Yet, ironically enough, it
could have been worse. The train that left the next day, on September 22nd,
the train they were supposed to be on, fared much, much worse. That slaughter took
place in the urban area of Gujranwala and was almost complete. There was no
escape there for young girls and boys on that train.
As much as the Raja wanted to help them, there was little he
could do. This would become a recurring theme until my mother was married, even
after. There was no home for her anymore. Raja had his own family with grown
children who were agitating that having Hindus under their roof now put all of them
at risk and that Hindus had no place in the town anymore. So it was decided
that my mother and her siblings would go to the camp in Pind Dadan Khan for
Hindu and Sikh refugees. I don’t know for sure if this was the same camp she
had left from, and whose narrow alleyways she walked with her mother just days
before. She didn’t talk about the camp, and what must have been unbearable
sorrow and agony, not to mention terrible conditions after a heavy monsoon
season.
The three children stayed there for some time. As the weeks
went on, some semblance of law and order was restored, and it became relatively
safe to travel. Her older sister’s husband came to fetch the children from the
camp and took them to Delhi. She stayed with her eldest sister and her family
in Delhi for many months, but due to the overcrowding in the house she spent
the summers in a refugee camp where she had some access to supplies.
Within a couple of years, she obtained a scholarship for
refugees and displaced persons sponsored by the Birla family. This enabled her
to attend a boarding school in Pilani, Rajasthan. She distinguished herself
academically and thus was able to fulfill two wishes that her mother had for
her—to become educated, and to take care of her younger siblings. Her
grandfather, had, after all, founded the only girls’ school in Pind Dadan Khan
some years before.
A decade later, she met my father while in graduate school.
Thirteen years after the horrible events of Partition, they were married. She
went on to become a mother of three children while pushing forward her career
as a researcher in studying neuroendocrines, with a seminal research project on
music therapy. For decades, she felt the obligation to take care of her sister
and brother well into their older years.
She spoke often of the joy of living in a
diverse society with different religions and languages, memories that glowed
with the warmth of her childhood in Pind Dadan Khan and came full circle in the
cultural melting pot of south Florida. And
always, the memory of being with her mother in the house when it felt like
home.
